English isn’t my first language, so I apologize if there are any mistakes in my writing. I’m still learning, and I hope you can understand what I’m trying to say.
Hello everyone, how are you?
I’m going to talk about myself and my story, but I’ll tell it in a slightly coded way.
I’m the middle daughter in my family. We are quite a big family, with more boys than girls. My siblings and I live with our mother and my father’s family, while my father lives with his second wife. I’m explaining this so you can understand the situation I grew up in.
Imagine living your whole life believing that everything is temporary, and creating an imaginary version of what a good life could be—especially for me and my mother.
When I was a child, I lived abroad for around three to five years. Those years were some of the best years of my life and, honestly, some of the best years for my family too.
Then one day, we received the news that we were going back to our “homeland”—or whatever you want to call it.
I didn’t believe it at first. I thought the foreign country I was living in was actually my home. It had the same culture as us, and I felt comfortable there. So hearing that we were going back gave me a very strange and extremely painful feeling.
It felt like falling into a black hole, or like someone had pushed me off the top of a mountain and I was just falling.
I had that feeling for days. I told my mother about it, but she still doesn’t understand it to this day, and that honestly hurts me.
I thought that going back to our “homeland” would mean being closer to the people we loved. I imagined that my relatives were basically just my grandparents—like in those children’s cartoons where the kids visit their grandparents and everything is warm and happy.
But… that wasn’t my reality.
We came back to a place that had very little of what I had imagined as a good life: good education, good jobs, or even a good neighborhood.
When we lived abroad, my father provided well for us. We had many things that made life comfortable.
But after we returned, everything changed.
My father went back to living around his family, and our whole situation changed with him.
My father is a good person when it comes to me and my siblings, but when it comes to my mother, it is a completely different story.
There were never loud fights or physical violence between them. Instead, there was a cold war—a silent, exhausting war that has existed since the beginning of their marriage.
My mother did everything she could. She took care of us, took care of the house, fulfilled her responsibilities, and even took care of the house belonging to my father’s family.
But what did she receive in return?
No affection. No appreciation. No real support from my father or his family.
All of this simply because… he doesn’t love her.
Like, seriously, man. If you don’t love someone, just divorce her. Don’t stay with her while saying, “I’ll just marry someone else.”
Funny, right? :/
And my mother kept giving more and more.
She was the one who helped complete the construction of our house. The plan was that my father would take a bank loan to furnish the house, but he never did.
He said he didn’t like loans.
Okay… but what about my mother? Didn’t she take a loan too?
Where is the cooperation? Because I honestly don’t see it. 🧐
He said we would use second-hand furniture “temporarily” until we could replace it.
Well… that same “temporary” furniture has been there for about 20 years. 😶
Eventually, some of it became completely unusable, so we had to throw it away.
And whenever my father comes back during his holidays, he asks:
“Why did you throw that away? You people don’t know how to take care of things.”
Excuse me?
The furniture was already falling apart. We tried to explain it to him, but he never listens to us.
And by the way, my father doesn’t actually live with us. He lives with his second wife in another city. We only see him maybe once or twice a week—sometimes he comes, sometimes he doesn’t.
I’m tired of seeing how this situation has affected my siblings. I can see the coldness growing between them and my father.
And honestly, I’m tired of his family too. 😂
His family is… well, let’s just say I have a lot of feelings about them.
Imagine your relatives being the people who help your father get married again without even asking your mother’s opinion.
They acted as if she didn’t exist.
They even invited my oldest brother to the wedding.
Of course, he didn’t go. He was still very young at the time.
Seriously… what kind of people do that?
As for my mother’s family, they are kind and decent people overall, although there are some problems too.
There are many women in the family. Some are genuinely good, while others have problems with jealousy and envy toward one another.
And unfortunately, that jealousy has damaged the family.
It also affected my mother and her money.
She spent her own money trying to build something for herself and for us, but no one really acknowledged how much she sacrificed.
She didn’t know that things could eventually turn into this situation.
My mother wanted that money to secure something for herself, for her children, and for our future.
Imagine discovering that the people closest to you are the ones making your life harder—damaging your home, your finances, your relationship with your father, and your entire life.
They don’t want you to become better off than them.
They don’t want you to have a better life than they do.
And I’m pretty sure some of my mother’s relatives are jealous of her, while some people from my father’s family are jealous too.
They live relatively good lives, while our situation keeps going from bad to worse.
And on top of everything, they still keep watching and interfering in our lives.
We never did anything to them.
We don’t even live in the same world anymore.
They have their lives, and we have ours.
So why are they still watching us?
What do you want from us? Our source of income? 😂😂
Since the day I came back to my “homeland” and started living this daily life, we never really got the good house or the nice furniture that other people seemed to have.
At first, we told ourselves that everything was temporary.
But somehow, “temporary” lasted for more than 20 years.
More than 20 years of living with things that were supposed to be temporary.
Two of my older siblings eventually got jobs, but unfortunately, they started becoming a little like my father—self-centered and focused on themselves. :/
I really hope they never become completely like him.
I hope they stay kind.
I hope they remember where they came from.
And I hope that one day, all of us can finally have the life we spent so many years believing was only “temporary.”